I no longer remember the circumstances, but when I was about nine years old, one of the adults in my life insisted to me that I should always and only follow the rules, and that, in fact, I should only ever want to follow the rules. Indeed, I think the central point ran along the lines that the rules codified that what good people want to do is permissible, and that what bad people want to do is forbidden, or something like that. So it should probably be the case that even without knowing the rules, a good person follows them.
This was not a compelling argument to a nine year old, and certainly not to me, and so I went and stewed about it for a few days, until I could resume the argument on my terms, making it very difficult to disagree with me.
It seemed to me that a rule, a law, must be made with the expectation that people would break it, and that the rule existed to permit punishment of its violation, and to encourage people to restrain themselves. Actually, for any rule there must be some reason why that which is forbidden would be desirable, at least in some situation.
I no longer remember which transgression it was that I was working so hard to justify, or at least to insulate myself from the consequences of. I remember that the argument repeated several times, with my position becoming more immovable each time, to the great frustration of someone who simply wanted me to acquiesce and to accept whatever it was that they were really trying to tell me.
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As an adult, I would go farther, and insist upon a moral universe in which rules are not necessarily in perfect alignment with right and wrong. There are times when it may be desirable to break just about any rule, and there are moments where it is an absolute moral necessity to dispense with the law entirely.
Most of us fall short of at least some of the expectations of others, and we probably violate a handful of the unwritten rules of good society. For each of us there may well be a handful of laws which we view as entirely pointless, or maybe even wrong, and so we act outside of them as a matter of routine.
Some laws attempt to restrain behaviours that are more or less benign, or at least whose violation goes unnoticed, and so we allow ourselves at least a little furtive indulgence.
In getting to know people, I find it interesting which things we actually do really feel bound to uphold, and more than that to discover when and where and how we feel comfortable to step over the lines. Our own particular mix of moral transgressions shows quite a lot about who we are and the life we live.
Some people break the speed limit as a matter of course because they value punctuality but struggle to actually perform it, while others choose to speed on occasion because they find it kind of fun. Some people allow illegal dwellings on their property to be rented, or even construct new ones, out of their sense of the moral urgency to house those who live unhoused, while others engage in the same behaviour for the short-term financial gain and feel little concern about whether the quality of the housing they offer and the fees they charge are an exploitation of a desperate other. Our transgressions can be extremely revealing, both about what our society does and does not value, and about who we are.
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Despite the intellectual confidence of my much younger self, I am not actually a very comfortable rule-breaker in practice, because even when I feel a sense of moral clarity, I don’t do very well with the fear of being caught.
It’s a sort of childish feeling, in that it is instilled into most of us as children, but the fear of being caught or found-out, and the sense of embarrassment or shame that we attach to our ability to know and follow the rules does a lot of the work of holding society together. There are a lot of rules which, all else equal, good people might well want to break, except for the fear of punishment.
We bring this from our childhoods sometimes quite inappropriately into an adult moral landscape, becoming scrupulous upholders of the rule for the sake of the rule itself, no matter the human consequence. I think often of how governments have at times worked behind the scenes to come up with legal justifications to do something which a previous generation quite wisely prohibited, as though finding a route by which it is legal to torture someone makes it any less awful to torture. That, too, is a kind of childhood morality, in which only what is exactly and explicitly prohibited is really to be forbidden or avoided.
Having lived our whole lives in a web of these distorted and arbitrary rules-kept and laws-violated, we come before God with the same kind of legal mind. We assign to God a more complete and powerful surveillance state, but still attempt to hide the occasional misdeed. We think in terms of the texts of prohibitions, and not the reality of our relationships with one another. We worry about what we will be punished for doing, but not so much about what we will regret leaving undone.
Except that God does not deal with us according to our sins. For all our wickedness, God does not make us suffer: we do. It is a horrible thing to do horrible things, whether we can get away with it or not. Laws, rules, these things are not divine commands to be upheld for their own sake: they are the collective wisdom of the past, the sum of pain that nobody else should ever have to know again. One generation says to another: trust us, you don’t want to live in a world where you let some people be tortured, and others go unhoused; you don’t want to put financial gain above all else, and you don’t want politicians who look out for themselves; you don’t want to know what it is like to have killed, and you don’t want to live in fear of being killed.
You can choose to dispense with the wisdom of the past, and sometimes even the very wise have gotten it wrong for a long time, but the law is there to help you, and even the most paternalistic and pedantic rules and regulations tend to be written in blood.
Through God’s extraordinary Grace, all our sins have been forgiven, but there are some things we must not do because they are bad for us. You must not kill your children, not even if you want to, and not even if it seems like God is telling you to, because your soul would not survive that. There are some burdens, some costs, which you really do not want. It is hard to live with having exploited others, having hurt others.
Even if we know beyond all knowing that tomorrow God will wipe the slate clean and forgive us once again, we should not live as though that makes whatever we do okay. This is what Paul preaches, and what Christ lives out. All of us are called to dispense with the law as some external and arbitrary set of superstitions to be kept for fear of eternal punishment, and to instead fulfill the law, to live rightly with one another, and to be the people we would wish to be, because otherwise our regret will consume us forever.
If we live our lives according to what we can get away with, everything is pointless, and we might as well not live at all. That is the inconsequential mind of the lucid dreamer or the video game player, in which nothing which happens really matters.
How we live, what we do to each other, and how we treat ourselves, however, creates the world as we know it, and ourselves as we are known. We construct the moral universe and our righteousness and our transgressions hold up the whole of the sky. We become exactly who we allow ourselves to be, and we are no better and no worse than the things we choose to do today. God is always calling us to be more, to do more, and to live rightly, not to threaten us with punishment, but to save us from suffering, a suffering we have known too deeply and for too long, a suffering of our own making.
May you know the joy of your liberation, and embrace the freedom of your salvation. May you love without hesitation and protect the stranger with all your righteousness. May you break the chains which have restrained you, and trust in yourself and in God to keep you safe without fear. May you let your own goodness shine so brightly that it works to inspire others, that we all may live in a world just a little better than we might expect.